Last winter a mysterious man in black appeared in a grainy black-and-white ad aired on CNN, CNBC, MSNBC and Fox. "Guten Tag! My name is Christian Baha. I am the founder of Superfund, a managed futures fund," he told viewers, noting they probably didn't know the fund was "available for American investors now." He added cryptically: "I would love to tell you more about Superfund, but regulations prevent me from describing it on television."

Gotcha. Though the TV ad, one of the first to promote a hedge fund, ran only in East Coast markets and disappeared after six weeks, hundreds of investors called in to learn the most tantalizing detail: While many hedge funds traditionally accepted $1 million minimum bets from only the richest investors, Superfund would start with a mere $5,000 from folks who earn as little as $45,000 a year. Even on Wall Street, where hedge funds recently have been dropping the minimum investment for a participant to $50,000 or even less, some execs say Quadriga Asset Management, which runs Superfund, may be pushing the envelope and could cause a crackdown.

"They don't like our success. Bad rumors, bad talking--I'm used to it," counters Superfund's Baha, 35, co-chief of Monaco-based Quadriga Asset Management. The Austrian-born Baha, who was a cop when he was in his early 20s, started the firm with countryman Christian Halper in 1996. The duo had worked together for six years, selling financial software to Austrian banks. They started by raising $360,000 from family and friends and struggled for four years.

But by 2000 Baha and Halper started hyping their hedge fund like a bar of soap, plastering the Quadriga name on European telecasts of Formula One car races and soccer matches and lining up jocks as endorsers. To hear Baha tell it, crash-weary investors eagerly signed up. He claims to manage assets totaling $1.3 billion from 40,000 clients and aims to expand that to $5 billion and 100,000 investors in three years. Quadriga now has nine offices from Hong Kong to New York, run by 12 directors in their early 30s. "Superfund--the name says everything. It's a fund, and it's super," Baha says.

Yet his fees--a management fee of 8% of assets plus a 25% cut of profits if returns meet a certain minimum--are way above industry norms. The hefty fees are justified by Superfund's performance, argues Arpad Deak, managing director for Quadriga in the Americas. Hmm. Quadriga's riskier Series B fund zigzagged in 2003, down 12% in July but up 27% in the month of December. Quadriga's two U.S. funds mimic earlier European funds that trade in and out of 100 futures: Half are financial futures (currencies, bonds, stock indexes); half are commodities (livestock, metals, grains). Software algorithms tell the traders what to trade.

Deak notes, though, that Quadriga's results are audited (some 35% of hedge funds aren't regularly audited) and that Quadriga has registered (voluntarily) with the SEC. He also says the SEC has "approved" Quadriga's fee structure; this seems unlikely, given that the SEC doesn't oversee hedge funds and doesn't weigh in on their fees.

In the U.S. Quadriga has a mere $50 million under management. Baha says he has to educate the market in order to get wider acceptance. This fall he plans to open an investment center in New York à la Charles Schwab or E-Trade. The firm has six such outposts in Austria and one in Germany. "We will show gold and grain in the window so people get a better feeling for what we are trading," he enthuses. Whether investors will take home the bacon remains to be seen.

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